How the Epstein Files Has Reminded Every Woman of How Unsafe She's Always Been

And how much danger she faced as a child

Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels

TW: Epstein files, sexual exploitation of minors

So we finally got the Epstein files. Quite a bit later than we were supposed to, but we got them. And heavily redacted to protect not the innocent but the perpetrators.

But we got them.

The pursuit of justice has finally come to an end. It wasn’t the way we hoped. Wasn’t the way we deserve.

Actually, there wasn’t really any justice, at all. But we have come to the end of the road. It’s a done deal.

Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the case is now closed. “There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs. But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.”

Even the president, whose name, family, and resorts are mentioned about 38,000 times in these files, has declared that the matter and over and done with. He said he believes it’s “...really time for the country to get on to something else.”

So, like I said, we’ve come to the end.

They have plenty of evidence to launch further investigations, but they are not going to do so. Victims will not get the justice they deserve, and in fact, have suffered even more in the release of these files, as the Department of Justice failed to protect the identities, images, and personal information of 43 victims, which is particularly stunning considering how meticulously they redacted the names of the perpetrators.

It is abundantly clear that the federal government’s priority is protecting pedophiles and sex traffickers - which, it would appear, includes a lot of their own.

And is any American woman surprised by this? Sadly, I doubt it.

There will be those who, I’m sickened to say, will brush this under the rug, remaining aligned with their husbands who don’t think this is a big deal, and the politicians to whom they’ve sworn their allegiance, at least one of whom appears everywhere in those files (as mentioned above).

And then there’s the rest of us who have watched this same old storyline play out again and again - sometimes in less extreme iterations that often involved us or close friends or family members.

We’re the ones who know the predators have been here all along. We’re the ones who understand that little girls and young women have been carrying the burden of men’s sexual violence for centuries.

And we’re the ones who know they’ll always get away with it.

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Like many women, no doubt, I awaited the release of the Epstein files with both hope and terror. Hope that perhaps, for once, justice would be served. Terror because I knew how sickening those files would be.

Any woman would. We were all little girls and teenagers once. So we know the pervasiveness of men’s sexual fetishization of young girls under the age of 16.

Every time I heard another sickening exchange from those emails, it was like traveling back in time.

I was 11 years old when men started ogling me. I had just started to develop breasts, and was painfully aware of how often men not only noticed them but openly stared at my chest. And the older the men were, the more common it was for them to grope my body with their eyes or make extremely inappropriate comments or jokes about my “blossoming body.”

I had no idea what was happening or what they meant, though the feelings their behavior inspired in me - fear and a sense of dirtiness - indicated that my body knew something was wrong.

It would never have occurred to me what they were thinking. Yes, I knew what sex was at that point, but I was a child. I still played with dolls and watched Saturday morning cartoons.

In no universe would it have occurred to me that a man in his 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and surely not 70s would want to put his penis inside me. There is no possibility that my young brain would have come to that conclusion.

But the next year of my life came with some hard lessons that forced me to grow up before I was ready.

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By the age of 12, I had C cup breasts and a generally bangin’ figure. I was tall for my age, blonde, and quite beautiful, if you can call a 12-year-old beautiful.

I thought it was bad when I was 11, but within the next year, I began to feel like a deer in hunting season. Men and boys were suddenly everywhere, seemingly unable to keep their eyes and hands off me.

I was repeatedly (and by that, I mean weekly if not daily) sexually harassed and/or assaulted by nearly a dozen boys at my school that year. They pushed me against a wall and thrust themselves against me in a simulation of sex, grabbed my ass as I walked by, and one of them wedged himself between my legs while I was at my locker, touching my vulva underneath my skirt.

My teachers - even the men - told me that I should wear baggier clothing, and several of them (including the male teachers) said that boys always harass girls with big breasts.

There I was, a 12-year-old child, with grown men in authority positions not only excusing the sexual harassment and assaults I was experiencing, but openly talking about my large breasts and using them as the reason why it was okay for the boys to treat me that way.

I’m horrified to say that my time outside of school wasn’t much better. I still remember the way men in their 30s and 40s, men who wore wedding rings and presumably had mortgages and babies, would go out of their way to open doors for me when my parents would ask me to run into the post office to pick up our mail while they waited in the car with my younger siblings.

At the grocery store, if my mother sent me to another aisle to grab some pasta while she was getting the canned goods, these men would openly watch me, hovering nearby. On occasion, they would compliment my clothing or comment on my beauty.

Again, my body gave me information my brain didn’t have, and had me scurrying away each time this happened. It took me until I was nearly 13 before I realized what was happening.

Suddenly, I understood that these men were attracted to me. They were hitting on me. Treating me like a sexual prospect.

They wanted to have sex with me.

I could not believe it. I still played with Barbies every now and then and started every journal entry with “Dear Diary.” I couldn’t fathom what these men could want with a child.

It was another decade or so before I figured that one out.

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By the time I was 14, I’d already been hit on by male teachers. There was one in particular in his late 50s or early 60s, who used to stand by his classroom door during passing period, which was near to my locker, and grab me when I walked by, enclosing me in deep, intimate hugs that made my skin crawl.

On Valentine’s Day that year, I was wearing an adorable red dress, and he came up behind me, held me tightly, stroked my arm, and whispered into my ear that he thought I looked so beautiful in that dress and hoped I would be his Valentine.

At 16, I once picked up a friend from her house, and her divorced father put his arm around me and repeatedly told me I was so beautiful and lovely. We all stood there, laughing nervously, and each time I tried to escape his embrace, he pulled me in tighter, showering me with more compliments.

Later, my friend confessed that her father was “totally hot for me,” and we had a forced laugh about it. It was so normalized, that kind of thing - that a grown man would have sexual feelings for a teenager. And that he would find it appropriate to act on that attraction in one way or another.

I knew from experience at that point that I was supposed to feel proud that I attracted a grown man’s attention. It was supposed to mean that I was beautiful, intelligent, and mature.

But I only felt dirty. Sick to my stomach.

And I was lucky. I knew so many (more than I can count on one hand) girls just in my immediate vicinity who were being raped repeatedly by their fathers or stepfathers. People knew about it and no one said anything.

I once heard a friend’s parents whispering about one particular incident, and the husband said, “A man has the right to do what he wants in his own household. It’s not our place to interfere.”

It chills me to admit that his words seemed totally reasonable to me at the time. He was a man, himself, so I took his word as law.

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It was all supposed to be totally normal. That’s the message I learned over and over again.

Grown men made jokes about the fact that young teenagers and little girls were far more sexually attractive than adult women, and we were supposed to laugh about it. Grown men were dating girls who were still in high school, and we were supposed to think they were so cool. Grown men said they were biologically designed to feel sexual attraction to young teenagers because it was, they claimed, how Mother Nature ensured the proliferation of the species, and we were supposed to nod and smile.

It’s all so clearly perverse. So clearly immoral. So clearly despicable.

And yet, here we are in 2026 and our country remains invested in protecting men’s right to exploit little girls and teenagers under 18.

All of us women who had to live through some version of this kind of hell throughout some or all of our childhoods are now feeling it all come to the surface as we hear more and more emails from the men who were associated with Jeffrey Epstein and his network.

“Thank you for a fun night… Your littlest girl was a little naughty.”

“God is a construct. Cute girls are real.”

“New Brazilian just arrived, sexy and cute,+=9yo.”

And what’s worse is how little men seem to care. I can’t help but suspect that the only reason people were riled up about this matter to begin with was because they were hoping it would implicate Democrats, particularly former president Barack Obama.

Why else are the QAnon folks and everyone who was violently angry about “pizzagate” remaining silent? Perhaps because their beloved political leaders are the ones who have been implicated?

Did anyone actually care about the little girls who were victimized, or was it just a political vendetta that didn’t work out the way conservatives had hoped?

There is no denying anymore that we, as a society, do not care about little girls. We have evidence now proving the harm and horrors they have endured, and yet those with the power to do something about it refuse to do so. Those who claimed they are all about family values and the protection of children have now shown that they are not concerned about the rape and trafficking of little girls.

So many of us had to get through our childhoods darting and sprinting across the savanna trying to escape the lions who were always nearby. Too many of us were caught and dragged into their dens, subjected to unspeakable horrors.

Nobody cared about us. It was the men who behaved this way who were protected and shielded by the community.

And now when we finally have the chance to redeem ourselves, to prove that we can do better for our little girls…we’ve stood in front of the world and said, “Thanks, but we’re gonna pass.”

Because nothing is more important in this country than keeping the beasts fed.

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